Although a growing stream of research investigates the role of government in corporate social responsibility (CSR), little is known about how governmental CSR interventions interact in financial markets. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal study of the socially responsible investment (SRI) market in France. Building on the “CSR and government” and “regulative capitalism” literatures, we identify three modes of governmental CSR intervention—regulatory steering, delegated rowing, and microsteering—and show how they interact through the two mechanisms of layering (the accumulation of interventions) and catalyzing (the alignment of interventions). Our findings: 1) challenge the notion that, in the neoliberal order, governments are confined to steering market actors—leading and guiding their behavior—while private actors are in charge of rowing—providing products and services; 2) show how governmental CSR interventions interact and are orchestrated; and 3) provide evidence that governments can mobilize financial markets to promote CSR.

There is evidence that the risk of stranded assets in the oil and gas sector is underpriced in financial markets. Publicly traded Western oil and gas companies are starting to write down assets, opening up the possibility that more rationalisation of value is likely to come. To the extent that large oil companies diversify portfolios to include cleaner energy and carbon sequestration technologies, it could reduce the risk of a sudden cascading change in the stock valuation of these firms and related bond and credit markets. Instead, the vast majority of oil and gas assets that will be stranded are in the control of sovereign states whose national budgets are highly dependent on oil and gas revenues. Thus, the problem of stranded asset risk for the oil and gas sector may be most relevant in markets for sovereign credit as well as risks that go beyond financial losses.

Globally, semi-arid lands (SALs) are home to approximately one billion people, including some of the poorest and least food secure. These regions will be among the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change. This article urges governments and their development partners to put SAL inhabitants and their activities at the heart of efforts to support adaptation and climate resilient development, identifying opportunities to capitalize on the knowledge, institutions, resources and practices of SAL populations in adaptation action.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world. Scientific research points out that it is predominately driven by human activity. There are three different types of risks that arise from this change. These have been broadly grouped into physical, transition and liability risks. These risks can impact general insurers to different degrees, depending on their business areas and investment strategies. These may pose different strategic, investment, market, operational and reputational risks. This paper provides General Insurance Practitioners with an overview of different aspects of insurance operations that may be affected by climate change. It highlights the impact of these risks on pricing and underwriting, reserving, reinsurance, catastrophe modelling, investment, risk management and capital management processes.

Over the past few years, the number of climate cases being filed against corporations and public authorities around the world has been on the rise. Aware of the central role of finance in economic development, the financial sector has remained vigilant. Traditionally, climate litigation in financial markets had been rare, but that seems to be changing: in 2018 there were more cases filed than in any previous year. The development of existing and forthcoming private and public sector initiatives with the aim of promoting sustainable finance may usher in even greater numbers in the next few years. This article provides the first systematic overview of climate cases in financial markets and introduces a typology to classify this type of climate case. This classification reveals common issues across different financial systems and raises questions for further enquiry that define a new research area within the emerging literature on climate litigation.

Since 2008, a global ‘land rush’ has been unfolding and so have efforts by international, national and regional actors to position themselves as the principal authorities in the determination of appropriate usages of land. This article examines three of the most influential ‘soft law’ instruments: the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment; the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems and; the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure. Despite their substantive differences, all three documents share a specific form of state-centrism. They imagine the host state of such large-scale investments as internally unitary and externally independent and entrust it with the bulk of responsibilities regarding the management of land investments. However, I argue that this particular form of state-centrism obscures the legal and administrative realities of the post-colonial state that is often legally bifurcated and subject to pervasive forms of international authority. Rather, an appreciation of the multitude of actors who claim jurisdiction over the lands of the South enables a better understanding of the legal mechanics of land-grabbing. Sierra Leone, which has been positioned as a ‘poster child’ for the implementation of such ‘soft law’ instruments, serves as the focal point of this jurisdictional approach to land-grabbing. In this context, the promise of ‘soft law’ instruments to make the post-colonial state the guarantor of universally beneficial large-scale land acquisitions is shown to be a false one.

A structural model for green bonds is developed to explain the formation and dynamics of green bond prices and to address the issue of the so-called ‘greenium’, that is, the difference between the yields on a conventional bond and a green bond with the same characteristics. We provide answers to the following questions: What are the determinants of the green bond value? Do green bonds enhance the credit quality of the issuer? Are green bonds a relatively cheap tool to fund sustainable investments? We also study the effect of investors' environmental concern on portfolio allocation. Our results have direct policy implications and suggest that an improvement in credit quality could ultimately lead to a lower cost of capital for green bond issuers and that governmental tax-based incentives and an increase in investors' green awareness play a significant role in scaling up the green bonds market.

This article reflects on the implications of the Trump presidency for global anthropogenic climate change and efforts to address it. Existing commentary, predicated on liberal institutionalist reasoning, has argued that neither Trump’s promised rollback of domestic climate-related funding and regulations, nor withdrawal from the Paris framework, will be as impactful as often feared. While broadly concurring, I nonetheless also in this article take a wider view, to argue that the Trump administration is likely to exacerbate several existing patterns and trends. I discuss four in particular: the general inadequacy of global greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and implementation efforts; the inadequacy of contemporary climate financing; the embrace between populist conservatism and opposition to action on climate change; and not least, the current global oil and gas boom which, crucially, is being led by the US. I submit that these patterns and trends, and the Trump administration’s likely contributions to them, do not augur well for climate change mitigation, let alone for an orderly transition to a low-carbon global economy. Given current directions of travel, I suggest, this coming transition is likely to be deeply conflict-laden – probably violently so – and to have consequences that will reverberate right across mid-twentieth-century international order.

Global fossil fuel subsidies are substantial and contribute to climate change. They also undermine the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. However, under the WTO, the international community's foremost economic institution, it is renewable energy subsidies, not fossil fuel subsidies, that have been subjected to litigation. To date, no fossil fuel subsidy has ever been brought before the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). This paper makes a unique contribution to the literature on energy subsidies by applying the WTO covered Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (1994) (SCM Agreement) to a specific government measure designed to support the coal export industry in Australia: namely, the proposed concessional loan for the construction of a rail line between the Carmichael coal mine and Abbot Point coal port by the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF). In finding that this measure is in breach of the SCM Agreement, this paper foreshadows future litigation and provides guidance to non-government organizations (NGOs) seeking to identify other unlawful fossil fuel subsidies.